History should not just be perceived as just politics and the military. it involves the whole realm of human expression and human experience. And to leave out music, art, literature, architecture, dance, poetry, drama is to leave out not just color and flavor and sound, but a lot of the soul of a culture. Many civilizations are known only for their art.

That's all as much a part of the American reality and the American story as our expected protagonists of history. In this one performance we have musicians, dancers, people speaking great literature, singing, architecture, all working at once. And we should never ever take it for granted.

Where time and circumstances permit, members are encouraged to replace some leisure activities with temple service. . . .

All of the ordinances which take place in the House of the Lord become expressions of our belief in that fundamental and basic doctrine of the immortality of the human soul. As we redouble our efforts and our faithfulness in going to the temple, the Lord will bless us.

Time must be taken for creative planning and for creative communication with key people. Many people become bogged down in their work with mechanical details, and a lot of trivia, and they almost become automations. Few people take the time to think very carefully about their assignments, to analyze the causes of the problems they deal with, to develop long-range plans of action to deal with them. This kind of reflection and planning takes initiative and imagination - in short, thinking, which is hard and an expression of individuality. But the dividends are rich in terms of building a sense of self-worth and self-power.

Love for Christ. This concept proclaims Jesus as the object of our love, and our lives should be an external expression of our gratitude for him. Sometimes that is difficult to do. I once visited a high priests group meeting where an older brother taught us. He noted that “as a people we often pray, ‘We thank thee for all the blessings we enjoy.’ But what about the blessings we don’t enjoy? It can be very hard to be thankful for those.” This dear man had just experienced his first Christmas without his sweetheart in more than fifty years. It is difficult to be grateful to the Lord under circumstances we don’t enjoy.

Our beloved President Benson told some of his experiences with the Saints in war-torn countries and shared the following: “One sister walked over a thousand miles with four small children, leaving her home in Poland. She lost all four to starvation and the freezing conditions. Yet she stood before us in her emaciated condition, her clothing shredded, and her feet wrapped in burlap, and bore testimony of how blessed she was.” (Ensign, Nov. 1980, p. 33.) Things we don’t enjoy must not overshadow our reasons to maintain our love for the Savior. Otherwise we may lose our perspective or become bitter, and our love for Christ may be lost.

So there are many Africas. There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa - and as many books about it as you could read in a leisurely lifetime. Whoever writes a new one can afford a certain complacency in the knowledge that his is a new picture agreeing with no one else's, but likely to be haughtily disagreed with by all those who believe in some other Africa....

All of these books, or at least as many of them as I have read, are accurate in their various portrayals of Africa - not my Africa, perhaps, nor that of an early settler, nor of a veteran of the Boer War, nor of an American millionaire who went there and shot zebra and lion, but of an Africa true to each writer of each book. Being thus all things to all authors, it follows, I suppose, that Africa must be all things to all readers.